Under
most circumstancesPaul
Meyer is glad to get close to a tree, but the huge log of Tilia
mandshurica hurtling toward his minivan was not a welcome sight.
During a 1997 trip to China, Meyer and his plant-hunting companions
had a harrowing encounter with a logging truck on a bumpy dirt road
on the way to Changbai Shan. After the accident, they got out to assess
the damage. To our absolute amazement, the driver side front door
had been cleanly ripped off, miraculously leaving the windshield,
as well as the rest of the car, intact, he wrote in his journal.
Had the log hit the van a few inches to the right, it would have
caught the frame and most likely killed the driver, and/or [passengers]
sitting directly behind the driver.

Traffic perils aside, plant hunting today is a considerably less dangerous
occupation than it was at the turn of the last century. That doesnt
mean that it is always predictable, however. Some finds have fallen
into their laps. Meyer was suited up to give a lecture at Seoul University
when he came across a lovely Korean lilac cultivated on its campus.
Other plant quests have involved climbing remote mountaintops.

Hunting
plants presents difficulties over and above those connected with hunting
big game, Wilson observed in his 1927 book, Plant Hunting.
The game hunter after finding, stalking and shooting his quarry has
but to remove the pelt, dress it and the trophy is won. The plant
hunter, in contrast, must abide the proper season for securing ripe
seeds, roots or small plants and often several fickle seasons pass
before success is attained. After plants reach their destination,
Then comes the test. Will the new arrivals adapt themselves to alien
climates and novel conditions of life? There are many ifs and
often months and years of anxious moments pass before the truth is
known.

At the Morris Arboretum, the waiting takes place in several greenhouses
not typically seen by the visiting public. Inside the Medicinal Housenamed
for a medicinal-herb garden once planted nearbythe temperature is
kept around 35 degrees Fahrenheit to prevent the most vulnerable plants
from freezing in the winter.

It requires a little imagination to square these puny contenders with
some of the towering adults in the public gardens. Anthony Aiello,
the arboretums curator and director of horticulture, shows nine seedlings
of Meyer spruce that look like dollhouse-sized Christmas trees. Named
after Frank Meyer, they are growing from seeds sown in the fall of
2002, after the arboretums last trip to China.

You
can see that these little guys have put on new growth, he says, pointing
to sections of light green on the needles. And this one doesnt look
like it made it.

We
really have to be patient, Aiello adds. You cant rush the plantsthey
are really on their own time frame.

Meanwhile,
on another workbench, the centuries-old process of grafting goes on
with varieties of witch hazel that Aiello collected in England and
Belgium in February. Small twigs, called scions, were inserted
into grown plants of native witch hazel and held together with rubber
bands. They then were placed in the moist environment of a plastic
tent for a few weeks.Afterward, they were wrapped with wax
tape to keep the graft moist and allow it to knit.As the scion
grows, the understock, or host plant,will slowly be cut back.
If all goes well, the witch hazel will be ready for the garden in
five to nine years, Aiello says.

The process is a little nervewracking, he admits. You go through
all this effortwhether its a trip like this, or especially if you
go all the way to Chinaand you bring these things back and wait for
the seeds to germinate or the scions to take. There are a million
things that can go wrong. But all we really need is for one of each
to take.

As plants grow, they move from the greenhouses to one of the hoop
houses so named for their rounded frames, which are covered with
plastic in the winter and shade cloth in the summer. The hoop houses
are semi-crowded way stations for a variety of trees and shrubs, including
silverleaf hydrangeas (a case of a native plant thats been completely
underutilized) from a collecting trip Aiello took to southern Appalachia
and a Yulan magnolia he chanced upon in a villagers backyard in Chinas
Shanxi province. A group of manchu striped maples touch the ceiling,
pushing for space.

Aiello regards them as a protective parent would a gangly teenager,
acknowledging that at some point these plants need to be put out
into the cold, hard world. Shelley Dillard, the arboretums propagator,
pushes him along. She always wants things to move out into the garden
and create space, he says. She really gives me a hard time if anything
has been down here for more than 10 years.

Before seeds and seedlings even arrive in the greenhouses, they are
documented in the plant recorders office. Each specimen at the arboretum
gets an accession number as if it were a painting in a museum. Field
notebooks kept in that office note exactly where each plant was found,
what it was growing with, and occasionally such details as luster,
hairs, flavor, and odor.

Often, these accessions are seeds, which are picked out of collected
fruit and allowed to rot in plastic bags during collecting trips.
You walk into our hotel room and it smells like a winery, Meyer
jokes. Those seeds are cleaned and then shipped with other kinds of
samples to U.S. authorities for inspection.

The arboretums herbarium contains another recorddried leaves, fruits,
and flowers arranged on acid-free paper like works of art. Herbarium
samples can last for hundreds of years and become permanent non-living
records of what the plants looked like, Aiello explains. They also
preserve DNA, which can be reconstituted for research.